Family welfare: gender, property, and inheritance since the seventeenth century

The history of welfare provision has generally focused on the rise of the so-called welfare state and institutional provision for the poor. Recent studies have begun to look beyond the state to other ways in which assistance, care, and support were provided in the past, but the focus remains primarily on the poor. This work widens our understanding of welfare by focusing not on the poor but on those who have some wealth. It draws attention to the importance of family as part of a mixed economy of welfare provision that also incorporates the state, the market, and the voluntary sector.||This bo

Introduction : family welfare and the welfare family / David R. Green and Alastair Owens -- Land transmission and inheritance practices in France during the Ancien Régime : differences of degree or kind? / Gérard Béaur -- Emigration, gender and inheritance : a case study of the high Auvergne, 1700/1900 / Rose Duroux -- Headship succession and retirement in South Bohemia, 1640/1840 / Hermann Zeitlhofer -- Close relatives and useful relatives : welfare, inheritance and the use of kinship in an alpine dynasty, 1650/1800 / Sandro Guzzi-Heeb -- Wealth, gender and inheritance amongst the U.S. elite : the Rockefellers and Binghams / Marsha Shapiro Rose -- Family networks and the transmission of assets : managing the property and care of orphans in eighteenth-century Amsterdam / Anne E.C. Mccants -- Did women invent life insurance? : widows and the demand for financial services in eighteenth-century Germany / Eve Rosenhaft -- Women without gender : commerce, exchange codes and the erosion of german gender guardianship, 1680/1830 / Robert Beachy -- Minors, guardians and inheritance in early nineteenth-century Sweden : a case of gendered property rights / Ann Ighe -- Marriage and economic rights : women, men and property in Sweden during the first half of the twentieth century / Kirsti Niskanen